ANNE CONWAY

This is the first intellectual biography of one of the very first English women philosophers. At a time when very few women received more than basic education, Lady Anne Conway wrote an original treatise of philosophy: her Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, which challenged the major philosophers of her day – Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza. Sarah Hutton’s study places Anne Conway in her historical and philosophical context by reconstructing her social and intellectual milieu. She traces her intellectual development in relation to friends and associates such as Henry More, Sir John Finch, F. M. van Helmont, Robert Boyle and George Keith. And she documents Conway’s debt to Cambridge Platonism and her interest in religion – an interest which extended beyond Christian orthodoxy to Quakerism, Judaism and Islam. Her book offers an insight into both the personal life of a very private woman, and the richness of seventeenth-century intellectual culture.

SARAH HUTTON is Reader in Renaissance and Seventeenth Century Studies at the School of Arts, Middlesex University. Her publications include The Conway Letters: The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More and their Friends, 1642–1684 (1992, a revised edition of a collection originally edited by Marjorie Nicolson in 1930), Ralph Cudworth: A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (Cambridge, 1996), Henry More (1614–1687): Tercentenary Studies (1990), and Platonism and the English Imagination (with Anna Baldwin, Cambridge, 1994).

ANNE CONWAY

A Woman Philosopher

SARAH HUTTON
Middlesex University

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© Sarah Hutton 2004

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
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First published 2004

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeface Adobe Garamond 11/12.5 pt. System LATEX 2_e [TB]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Hutton, Sarah, 1948--
Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher / by Sarah Hutton.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 83547 X
1. Conway, Anne, 1631–1679. I. Title.
B1201.C5534H88 2004
192 – dc22 2004040786

ISBN 0 521 83547 X hardback

In memory of Rebecca

Contents

Acknowledgements

While writing this book I have benefited enormously from the help and encouragement of many people, among whom I would particularly like to thank Stuart Brown, Richard Popkin, John Rogers and the late Jan van den Berg, for their encouragement and support at different stages of the book’s development. I thank Alan Gabbey for imparting his invaluable knowledge of the Conways and Northern Ireland. The shared interest of Susan James and Eileen O’Neill in seventeenth-century women philosophers has always been inspiring. I am very grateful to those who have read and commented on some or all of the typescript: Allison Coudert, Frances Harris, Anne Kelley, Margaret Osler and Jan Wocjick. Thanks also to the Cambridge University Press readers for their constructive suggestions, and to Benjamin Carter for assistance in checking the typescript. This book could not have been written without access to the rich collections of the Armagh Robinson Library, the British Library, the libraries of Christ’s College, Cambridge, and Friends’ House, London, the Herzog August Bibliothek, the Huntington Library, the Wellcome Institute Library, Dr Williams’s Library and the Library of the Warburg Institute. I am grateful to the librarians and staff of them all for access to their collections. Thanks are also due to His Grace the late Marquis of Hertford for permission to inspect the collections at Ragley Hall. I thank the Huntington Library, California, for granting me a Mellon Fellowship to enable me to consult the Hastings papers, and for permission to quote from them. I am grateful to the British Library for permission to quote from the Additional Manuscripts, and to the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland for permission to quote from the Finch papers. My thanks also to the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, for permission to quote from the correspondence of Knorr von Rosenroth, and to Oxford University Press for permission to quote from The Conway Letters. Last, but by no means least, I thank the British Academy for granting me an award under their Research Leave Scheme, which enabled me to do the major groundwork for this book.